I agree that humans can be effective at wiping out species, but that is a relatively recent event.
Guns or poisons, it’s up to you.
I’m certainly not claiming that man never took a mammoth, there is plenty of irrefutable evidence he did.
What I am saying is that it was probably a rare event. A much more frequent event would have been half, if not more, of the hunting party being ripped to shreds, the tribe losing their strongest and bravest hunters. The cost of a mammoth kill would have been simply enormous.
Consider also that there were quite a number of species that went extinct at the same time, also that there were islands off of Northern Siberia that had quite large mammoth populations, islands that were not inhabited by men. Mammoths disappeared from those places as well.
ALTHOUGH!!
There have been infrequent references to people in the early 1900’s having mammoth sightings in various places, so it’s certainly possible that a small indigent population still exists somewhere.
Hard to hide a mammoth. They should be visible from space with a weather satellite.
It’s not recent at all. We’ve been wiping out species from the start. Man colonized Australia a long time ago, and all those species didn’t die at the same time because they caught the flu from us!
If you think that man hunted mammoths incompetently and often got himself killed, I have to ask what you are smoking. That’s just not how men operate. If we want to do something, we will figure out the most efficient and least dangerous way to accomplish it, and once we have, we’ll just follow that procedure from that point on. So, when we first started hunting mammoths, yes, a lot of people probably got gored and trampled. Once we figured out the right method, then we’d follow that procedure and be taking down mammoths with near impunity just like every other animal that we set about to hunt. If we couldn’t figure out an efficient procedure, then there wouldn’t be much evidence of us hunting them, since we would have avoided it whenever we possibly could. People just aren’t suicidal or stupid, and we are talking about people, despite the popular conception of dumb “cavemen”.
“Consider also that there were quite a number of species that went extinct at the same time, also that there were islands off of Northern Siberia that had quite large mammoth populations, islands that were not inhabited by men. Mammoths disappeared from those places as well.”
The mammoths on the isolated islands without men lasted much longer than any others! They survived longer precisely because we were not hunting them.
I have an old book,THE DEFEAT OF JOHN HAWKINS by Rayner Unwin in which survivors of a Spanish raid on their ships are dropped off near what is today Tampico Mexico.
ONE YEAR later one of the men, David Ingram, is picked up by a French ship, the GARGARINE off the coast of what is today NOVA SCOTIA.. He told of his journey overland in which he described elephants in the interior. He told his story to a committee chaired by Sir Francis Waslingham in 1582.
How did he get from Mexico to Nova Scotia in one year overland through completely unexplored country has never been explained.
Another interesting thing is some American explorers often found mammoth bones above ground and one group even propped some of the ribs up and made a temporary shelter out of them. How did such bones survive thousands of years above ground?